YOW! Sydney 2018

Last week I attended the YOW! 2018 Sydney Conference. I enjoyed the experience. I was able to host a track on the Friday, meet some awesome speakers and had taken some awesome sketch notes. Here are some selfies with the speakers as I gave them their sketch notes:

3x; Explore Expand and Extract by Kent Beck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2XR73LnRY 


Kent Beck  is one of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto, Author of the Extreme Programming book series and rediscoverer of Test-Driven Development. Read up on the conversation; is TDD dead? Kent gave an inspiring talk of combining rapid exploration and maximum value adding extraction from his time at FaceBook.

1968 by Kevlin Henney  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbgsfeGvg3E

The premise of this talk by Kevlin Henney (go check out his blog on Medium) was that everything that is considered “New” is actually quite old. But this reminds me of a quote  from CP Grey;


We think of technological change as the fancy new expensive stuff, but the real change comes from last decade’s stuff getting cheaper and faster

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/humans-need-not-apply

All this “New technology” we have today is facilitated by improving hardware.

Breaking Codes, Designing Jets and Building teams by Randy Shoup

Check out Randy’s blog here

This talk was about how diversity, purpose and organisational culture can help teams achieve great things using examples from the code breakers of world war II, Skunk works jet building projects and Xerox Park. Randy also gave this other talk at YOW on engineering yourself:

Cloud Performance and root cause Analyst at Netflix by Brendan Gregg

Brendan’s Blog

This talk was a summary of all of the different tools used when doing a deep dive investigation of performance of the many micro services that Netflix uses. Similar vein to this talk:

Cloud, Containers & Kubernetes by Bridget Kromhout

Bridget had once spoken at 30 conferences in one year. Now she averages a more reasonable 2 per month on average. Containers will not fix your broken culture is an interesting follow up blog to read. It was along a similar vein of this talk:

Events and Commands for Asynchronous Microservices by Chris Richardson

Chris has a book on micro service patterns. You might enjoy this other talk by Chris:

Future of High Speed Transportation by Anita Sangupta

No Code by Advi Grimm

Advi asks, do you really need code to help you build that solution?

Shaving the golden Yak by Jessica Kerr

Jessica also gave a keynote on the overlap of opera and programming

The problem with pre-aggregated metrics by Christine Yen

Check out this interview with Christine Yen:

Top ten security flaws by Gary McGraw

Similar in vein to this video:

Conclusion

YOW! was a lot of fun with many highly regarded international speakers who write the books on these things. There were themes of an old analogy is seen as “new” (opera and programming, 1968, and breaking codes).  There’s many new tools out there to keep an eye on in the near future.

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